he White House announced a daring new plan this week to address the nation's ballooning health care costs, which are crippling employers and causing otherwise sensible Americans to talk about national health care like dirty fucking socialists. By making poor health a law-enforcement issue, Washington hopes to get tough on the sick with bold mandatory sentencing for citizens convicted of harboring cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

"It's time to stamp out this national cancer," announced President Bush to a menagerie of stuffed animals standing in for reporters who thought the subject of the press conference tipped off an obvious gag invite. "And that's a convenient metaphor, or Similac, because I'm actually talking about cancer. And diabetes. Uh, heart disease… what are some of the other ones? The shits. Definitely got to stamp out the shits."

The new "War on Illness" will integrate aspects of several national programs aimed at ending GDP-draining sickness, including "Get Tough on Cancer," "Zero Tolerance for Juvenile Diabetes" and "Not in My Neighborhood: StrokeBusters." Supporters hope the new initiatives will sweep America's streets clean of the sickly and infirm, and keep future generations safe from the social decay caused by sick people.

"If you choose to get terminally ill, well, that's a mistake you're going to regret," crowed Judge Thomas Redbone in support of the plan, posing with an impressively oversized gavel. "No longer can we tolerate this blight on our neighborhoods or the threat it poses to our children."

Under the guidelines of the new plan, a first offense for harboring cancer, diabetes, pneumonia or other Class 5 controlled illnesses will trigger a mandatory five-year sentence, with repeat offenders coming out of cancer remission to receive life without the possibility of parole. The death penalty remains a possibility should the disease be diagnosed as fatal. Even more controversial is the plan's call for strict "Three Strikes and You're Out" sentencing for perpetrators of mental illness, to deal with wayward individuals lacking the willpower or strength of character to stay sane.

While predictably receiving criticism from the sick and terminally liberal, Bush's plan is already garnering widespread support from Americans tired of worrying about their kids falling victim to this societal scourge, and those who worry they themselves could one day be robbed by a sick person desperate for health care.

"It's a tough law, but fair," conceded June Striber, a former cancer sufferer now in remission. June hopes that with God's help, she'll remain on the right side of the law.

Critics question how Bush intends to implement the plan without addressing the problem of our nation's already overcrowded prisons. The president quelled these concerns with news that the incarceration overflow will be handled by converting schools closed due to recent education cutbacks into prisons, as well as GM factories shuttered due to overseas outsourcing and museums no one was visiting anyway. According to the president, even further room for sickly inmates can easily be found in abandoned K-Marts and in failed dot-com office space nationwide.

he world of professional spelling garnered national attention this week, as well as controversy, when under-age spelling wunderkind Anurag Kashyap went first in the National Spelling League draft to the Anaheim Syllables. Kashyap is the youngest wordsmith to ever skip college and high school to go straight to the pros.

Pro spelling has had to face criticism from those who claim the major leagues have gone after younger and younger wordsmiths ever since the formation of the National Spelling League in 1998. Detractors claim the NSL is luring away some of America's brightest young minds from academic careers that could help them in the non-spelling world.

Mere mortal Kashyap was selected from among 150 other stellar spellers for a lead position on California's Anaheim Syllables, a major contender in the Eastern division of national spellers. In previous drafts, students as young as 15 have skipped completion of high school and college to enter professional league spelling, but Kashyap, a "spelling monster," according to sports writers, will be foregoing high school and college in entirety for a 3-year $18 million contract.

"People raise hell when an athlete, or even a mathlete skip college to go pro," said Kashyap's coach, Oxford Associate Professor of Spelling Chip Bustero, "but these are Anurag's prime spelling years. He's only got another few years of language mastery before the memory starts to go. Every year he puts off going pro he not only loses that salary, but all the lucrative endorsement deals. Nike is thinking about going into notebook and paper production—Anurag's just the kind of brainiac they're looking for to promote those products. And we're already in talks with Bic and Pilot. Whoever's got the deeper pockets can lock in a deal now, before he really puts professional spelling on the map."

However, opponents among the living argue that word jockeys like Kashyap not only lose college opportunities and training for careers outside the spelling world, but other prospects, like being a part of the 2008 Olympics spelling team. Spelling Coach to the American Olympic team Ruben Fartstarter expressed worry about the future of Olympic spelling if other star Englishologists like Kashyap lose eligibility.

"We were beginning to make real headway in the 2004 Olympiad. Then Hattie Page and Yukio Konichi both go for top dollar to the Seattle Suffixes and the Pittsburgh Homonyms, respectively. We're losing top talent and the word nerds of tomorrow aren't even going to college teams anymore. We were ranked third to England and Australia last time, which means we're only beating countries that don't speak English. Can you imagine a few under-scoring amateurs getting up on a stage in front of the whole world and misspelling 'misspell'? We'll look quite the fools."

The potential scandal comes at the worst time for the new professional sport, following accusations over the last few months that some of the sport's most notable stars have been taking spelling-enhancing drugs. The damaging allegations came in the form of a book by 19-year-old retired San Francisco Palindromes speller Anita Watt, I Before E Except After Steroids. Also in the book are damning accusations of excessive alcohol use and well-known spellers taking cocaine, even during the 2004 Olympics, including harrowing descriptions of all-night "speed-spelling" matches.

The jig is up, jig-lovers. After years of speculation, snooping, allegations, bribes, misinformation and games of inter-office dirty pool, it's time to let the cat out of the bag: I am the shadowy commune informant known as "Deep Omar."

True, this is hardly news to regular readers of my column, since I've been dropping hints to this fact for years, and even took the bagged cat out for a stroll a few years ago in my 2002 column "Deep Omar is the Chess Messiah". But as everyone knows, printing something in the commune is hardly the way to get the word out about anything, even to the commune staff themselves, and even when they're all eagerly snooping in hopes of cashing in on Red Bagel's $10,000 bounty for information about Deep Omar's identity.

But now I think it's time to get the word out to the world and let the healing begin. So in addition to writing this column, I've also added an "I'm Deep Omar, Bitch!" tag line to the end of my answering machine message. That alone has four times the word-spreading power of writing something in the commune, so I figure the word is as good as out there.

Because this world, and especially this office, has existed too long in the shadow of lies and deception. I'm tired of Ramrod Hurley claiming to be the leaker in a desperate grab for in-office street cred. And I'm bored of watching Ivan Nacutchacokov take a lie-detector test every time he comes in the office, because of Red Bagel's suspicion about his foreign-sounding name. Also, I needed that $10,000 to get the 8-track player in the Bricksmobile IV fixed since it's been playing Santana backwards for three weeks now and I get egged every time I drive past a church.

I know what you're thinking, why not go all the way and get a CD player put in? Well, you know Omar Bricks is all about that, but I think they just got 8-tracks down in Panama recently since this car isn't wired for that shit at all. The dude at Best Buy said the best he could do would be to upgrade to a record player, but I just don't think that would suit my driving style, which entails a lot of off-road shortcuts and a complete disregard for speed bumps. Plus, having my dashboard eject an LP would look a lot like some kind of weird robot giving me a black-licorice raspberry, and that's not a distraction I need while cutting through the Taco Bell drive-thru to avoid a light.

So in the interest of solidarity and personal finance, I marched into Red Bagel's office last week and spilled the beans that I was the one who had leaked the classified info about him coloring his hair. Not maliciously, of course, I always traded that info for cash or a get-out-of-jail-free card when necessary. And as I reminded Bagel, I only knew because Raoul Dunkin told everyone the same thing when he was drunk at the commune Christmas party back in '99 anyway; I was just the only one who remembered since I hadn't had any of the PCP-laced muffins from that hippie collective Bagel had hired to cater the thing. They had raisins in them, and Omar Bricks doesn't truck with raisins. Yuck.

As soon as he heard Dunkin's name, Bagel forgot he'd spent the last six years digging through the commune trash trying to find me, pushed a cashier's check across the desk and headed off in the direction of Raoul Dunkin with a cricket bat. Sorry, Assbag. But that's what you get for saying my car stinks like Doritos. Bricks out.

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